1. I started dating Anne Marie when I was just short of my 15th birthday

2. I married Anne Marie when I was just short of my 20th birthday

3. In between those two dates, I didn’t always treat Anne Marie as well as could have. I hope I do a lot better now.

4. I get annoyed with people’s idiosyncrasies, and my own as well

5. I sometimes exclaim: “Man, I am SUCH a freak!”

6. I don’t think Johnny Cash really made that great a contribution

7. I demand too much of my little girls sometimes… but much was demanded of me when I was little and I’m now thankful for it

8. I haven’t written many new songs in the last few years and I sometimes worry that the gift is gone. If it is gone, it found it’s way to Shane. Shane writes good songs.

9. I can sleep anywhere… and it doesn’t have to be quiet either

10. I have wasted many years at my current job. I plan to fix that problem in the next couple of months

11. I once took too many free balloons from the grocery store. My mom made me take them back. I was frightened and humiliated and that day I learned a valuable lesson

12. Some things that I think are funny are actually mean (peace out Shane)

13. I sometimes shamelessly promote my blog

14. I cry almost every time I hear Counting Crows “Miami”

15. I cry when I watch that cheesy “You… complete me” scene in Jerry Maguire

16. I cried for about 10 minutes – actually I wept – after watching Charlize Theron in “Monster” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340855/

17. I can’t find or imagine finding another family as knit together or unique as the Krahns.

18. I have three daughters and no desire to have a son

19. I don’t fear aging, in fact I’m looking fwd to it

20. A few years ago, I almost converted to Roman Catholicism.  I still consider Thomas Merton a mentor.

21. I like books

22. Sleep is a necessary evil

23. Jack Layton makes me nauseous

24. I have a lot of hope for Barack Obama, although I wish he’d change his views on abortion

25. If anything goes wrong in the USA, Jack Bauer can fix it with threats of violence… and violence.

NBC has reportedly rejected the following ad, saying that NBC and the NFL are not interested in advertisements involving “political advocacy or issues.”

What do you think?

Send feedback to NBC to: victoria.morgan AT nbc.com

For those of you who don’t know, Rick Warren was asked to pray at Barack Obama’s inauguration. He closed his prayer “I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life—Yeshua, ‘Isa, Jesus [Spanish pronunciation], Jesus—who taught us to pray:” followed by The Lord’s Prayer.

Contrary to this report by Daniel Cordell which seems to be making the rounds, I spoke to a Muslim immigrant friend this morning and posed the question “Who is Isa?” Without hesitation, his immediate response was “That’s Jesus in Arabic. That’s the word used for Jesus in Arabic countries.”

This deserves more research, but one to one I think I’ll take the word of an observant Muslim immigrant on the issue.

In Arabic countries, Isa is the name for Jesus and Allah is the name for God. Without prompting, my Muslim friend also said that Christian preachers in the mid-east commonly use Isa and Allah to refer to Jesus and God, and when they do this their meaning is clear to both Christians and Muslims.
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Here is Mark Driscoll’s take on Warren’s Prayer.

What do you think?

These are from the post “Being Pro-Life Christians Under a Pro-Choice President” by John Piper:

1. Are you willing to explain why a baby’s right not to be killed is less important than a woman’s right not to be pregnant?
2. Or are you willing to explain why most cities have laws forbidding cruelty to animals, but you oppose laws forbidding cruelty to human fetuses? Are they not at least living animals?
3. Or are you willing to explain why government is unwilling to take away the so-called right to abortion on demand even though it harms the unborn child; yet government is increasingly willing to take away the right to smoke, precisely because it harms innocent non-smokers, killing 3,000 non-smokers a year from cancer and as many as 40,000 non-smokers a year from other diseases?
4. And if you say that everything hangs on whether the fetus is a human child, are you willing to go before national television in the oval office and defend your support for the “Freedom of Choice Act” by holding in your hand a 21 week old fetus and explaining why this little one does not have the fundamental, moral, and constitutional right to life? Are you willing to say to parents in this church who lost a child at that age and held him in their hands, this being in your hands is not and was not a child with any rights of its own under God or under law?

Read the entire post and comment there or comment below.

Update

Related content: this post by Justin Taylor 

Also this post re: Roe vs. Wade